Below is the link to a paper I presented 6/28/17 at the annual meeting of the Tyndale Fellowship–Christian Doctrine Study Group at Tyndale House, Cambridge, UK.
The paper’s abstract reads as follows:
Several prominent evangelical scholars have drawn attention to the pneumatological deficit at work in post-Reformation Protestant theology. Moreover, some have suggested that certain evangelical takes on the Reformation theme sola Scriptura are at least partially to blame for this Spirit-devaluing dynamic. This paper addresses the question: Is it possible to support sola Scriptura while at the same time affirming the practice of a particular type of prophetic preaching: Spirit-empowered sermons that are genuinely transformational precisely because they are sacramental (encounter-facilitating) in their effect? The first section of the paper explores the connections that do indeed seem to exist between two overly restrictive takes on sola Scriptura and a marginalization of the Spirit in contemporary evangelical theology and ministry. A second section examines the evidence for the thesis that a pneumatological realism implicit in the Scripture-based Reformed theology of Karl Barth, when combined with his distinctive takes on the nature of revelation and the three-fold form of the Word of God, provide some rather impressive (even if tacit and ironic) theological support for the type of prophetic preaching referred to above. Bringing the paper to a close is a succinct, yet substantive, Barth-sensitive reflection on what a pneumatologically real approach to the preaching task entails.
